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Mayor Michael Bloomberg never seems satisfied to leave bad enough alone. He now seeks to model New York’s gun laws upon the Chicago murder capital fiasco, and is financing a $12 million propaganda campaign to sell his “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” program. While a major focus, at least for now, is to push for legislation mandating national background checks on all handgun sales, don’t expect the mayor’s anti-gun agenda to end there. His group has also circulated a factually-flawed report charging that the NRA has “kept the country in the dark about gun violence”.

Who is really keeping the nation in the dark? Perhaps the bullet items that follow will shed some points of light on this matter.

1. Tough Gun Laws Don’t Reduce Murder Rates

New York already has some of the nation’s most restrictive gun laws. They include a recently-enacted “NY Safe Act” which imposes federal background checks for private gun sales in the state, requires owners to register arbitrarily-defined “assault weapons”, and bans purchases of new magazines with capacities of more than seven rounds. The latter restriction amounts to a ban on most formerly-legal semi-automatic weapons, both pistols and long guns, since no seven- round magazines exist on the market. While some five-round magazines exist and ten-round magazines can be professionally modified to reduce the capacity, that’s something that an average gun owner shouldn’t attempt to do.

And that’s not all. Other NY Safe Act provisions require registration of ammunition sellers and buyers, set five-year renewals of handgun licenses statewide, and direct reporting to authorities by mental health professionals of patients deemed likely to hurt themselves or others.

It should be noted that New York City homicide rates are now on track to reach the lowest level in over half a century. According to the NYPD, 414 people were murdered in the Big Apple in 2012, compared with 515 in 2011, and despite a smaller population, far fewer than the 2,245 homicides in 1990. Still, overall crime for 2012 has increased in all five boroughs, an uptick which the city hasn’t experienced in 20 years.

So are falling New York City murder statistics attributable to strict gun laws? Well if so, they don’t seem to be working very well in Chicago, where they have been even stricter. Chicago saw homicides jump to 513 in 2012, a 15% hike in a single year. With the toughest gun laws in the nation, Chicago’s murder rate is 15.65 per 100,000 people, compared with 4.5 for the Midwest, and 5.6 for Illinois.

Then there’s Washington, D.C., where a gun ban was enacted in 1976. That year there were 188 homicides. By 1988, despite those strict new gun laws, D.C.’s annual homicide toll jumped 36%, and by 1991 it rose to 482, with 80% of those involving firearms. Then in 1991 murders gradually declined, a circumstance police attributed to an aging crack population. But guess what! In 2008 when the ban was overturned, the number of murders dropped to 186. Last year, there were only 88.

2. Criminals and Gangs Don’t Get Background Checks

Whereas New York’s Michael Bloomberg, Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel and other big city mayors may suggest that “universal background checks” aren’t really connected to gun registration or outright bans, don’t be fooled. First, there is no way to determine if a private individual trades or purchases a gun from another without an effective and enforceable gun registration record system that keeps track of who owns what.

If someone desires to transfer possession of a firearm to a family member or friend, what motivation would there be to accomplish such a simple and commonplace transaction through a gun dealer? And what business is it of the government to know…if not to pave the way for taxing authority through regulatory permits…or worse, to achieve incremental, ever-more restrictive and arbitrary bans on gun types that politicians and bureaucrat cronies determine we aren’t allowed to own?

Of course, those least likely to comply with background checks, or any type of gun regulations, are those who hold all rules of law in low regard from the get-go. Many of the most dangerous are young gang members who live in tough gun law cities. Nationally, 67% of all firearm murders currently take place in the country’s 50 largest metro areas. The top 62 cities in these areas have an average murder rate of 9.7 per 100,000 people, which is more than twice the national average. Among teenagers, the firearms murder rate is 14.6, nearly three times the national average.

Up to 80% of Chicago’s murders and shootings are gang-related. By one estimate, the city has 68,000 gang members (59 gangs and 625 factions), four times the number of cops. Yet Mayor Rahm Emanuel continues to preach stricter gun control over gang control, and he opposes Illinois’ imminent concealed carry law.

3. Gun Laws Can’t Control Absentee Parenting

Consider that some of the most restrictive bans in the country didn’t stop 52 public school students from being fatally shot during the 2009-2011 school years in heavily gun-controlled Chicago. Rather than parroting simplistic, knee-jerk, feel-good gun regulations, real solutions must address the decline of cultural expectations and ethical values we instill in our children.

Sadly, none of President Obama’s 23 anti-gun crime executive orders addresses the documented disintegration of the nuclear American family, especially many African-American families. Statistics cited by the Black Women’s Agenda (BWA), Inc. indicates that in 2009, black males ages 15-19 were eight times as likely as white males the same age, and 2.5 times as likely as their Hispanic peers to be killed in a gun homicide.

Yet while BWA strongly advocates strict gun control legislation, it requires no stretch of imagination to link these tragic figures to staggering rates of one-parent families, those without fathers in particular. Today, 72% of black children are born out of wedlock, as are 53 % of Hispanic children, and 36% of white children. Back in 1965, 25% of black children were born out of wedlock, nearly one-third fewer. As a result, promiscuous rappers, prosperous dope peddlers and street gang leaders are becoming ever more influential role models.

4. Gun Laws are Racist

Liberal anti-gun politicos might be disquieted to learn that gun legislation dating back to the 19th century placed high taxes and bans on inexpensive guns in southern states specifically to prevent purchases by poor blacks and whites. Later, the Gun Control Act of 1968 was precipitated during 1965-1967, when an unprecedented number of race riots broke out in 125 American cities, including the Los Angeles Watts area, Detroit, and Newark. Violent revolution threats issued by Stokely Carmichael and other Black Panthers fueled public paranoia, as did national media coverage of angry crowd confrontations with police at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

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